Patent troll takes last shot at owning “interactive web,” but falls short

A Texas Judge refused to revive the notorious Eolas patent.

A patent-trolling firm called Eolas, working together with the University of California, took a notorious patent to trial in East Texas earlier this year, trying to win close to $1 billion from Internet companies including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and others. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, actually flew down to East Texas to testify for the defense, which ultimately beat Eolas.

Now Eolas has taken a final, post-trial longshot, but missed its target again.

Judge Leonard Davis, who oversaw the case, issued an order (PDF) today that puts a final stop on attempts by Eolas and its owner, Michael Doyle, to claim it owns technology that's critical to running any "interactive" site on the web. That means Eolas can't use its 5,838,906 patent, or a successor patent, No. 7,599,985, to sue anyone, unless it manages to overturn this verdict on appeal.

In its motion, Eolas presented several arguments that the jury verdict was unreasonable and not based on enough evidence—for instance, Eolas lawyers argued that a defense expert had improperly used different codebases of a pioneering web browser called Viola. Judge Davis rejected that, finding that "a reasonable juror could infer that, to the extent that Phillips testified generally about Viola, the testimony applied to all three codebases in evidence."

Eolas lawyers also argued that the jury should have been allowed to see the licensing agreements they had scored with previous defendants. Davis tossed that aside as well, pointing out that Eolas had already asked for—and won—a ruling stopping the other side from referring to the company's "business success or failure." Since defense lawyers weren't allowed to point out to the jury that Eolas was a company with no business beyond making patent demands, Eolas couldn't complain that its licensing agreements were kept out of the argument.

Finally, Eolas argued that the jury had been swayed by "passion and prejudice" rather than the facts, and it at least deserved a new trial. Davis scarcely even responded to that allegation, noting only that lawyers for both sides had behaved professionally throughout the case and that "there is no indication the jury based its verdict on anything other than the evidence presented at trial."

Eolas and Doyle sued Microsoft in 1999, a long-lasting litigation that went through twists and turns before settling in 2007. Two years later, Eolas went full-bore "patent troll," suing more than 20 defendant companies, including Apple, Playboy, Perot Systems, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, and others. Many of those companies settled, and several more settled during a lightning-fast, four-day trial in Texas. Only Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and J.C. Penney stuck it through to the final verdict.

Michael Doyle and two co-inventors had University of California lawyers file for the patent while running a computer science program at UC San Francisco back in 1993. He later spun it off into Eolas, a company that made him wealthy through its patent attack on Microsoft.

The University of California got a 25% share of Eolas' settlement with Microsoft—more than $30 million. UC presumably made a similar amount from settlements with these defendants, and could have made hundreds of millions had Eolas been successful at trial.